Developers react to iOS 7 and being “Sherlocked” at WWDC 2013

Ars talked to the crowd on the WWDC showfloor.

SAN FRANCISCO—The unveilings of iOS 7 and OS X Mavericks at Monday's Worldwide Developers Conference were anything but boring to Apple's developer community. Following the keynote, where Apple CEO Tim Cook and other executives took to the stage to show off the company's upcoming software products, buzz about the brand new OSes was high among the 5,000+ developers in attendance.

But while the new mobile and desktop features—not to mention a long-awaited update to the Mac Pro line—certainly got people talking, iOS 7 appeared to dominate the conversations. So I asked a number of developers, both in person and online, for their thoughts on Monday's announcements.

New features for some, miniature American flags for others

"As a developer, I cannot wait for automatic updates," Zak Dillon of Dillon Software told Ars. "Coordinating with our back-end team to make backwards compatible Web services is an unnecessary pain. It will be nice to have everything synced up, like when we deploy a Web application...As a human being, I love Control Center. Seems like one of the most useful features since multitasking in iOS 4."

iOS developer Darshan Shankar wholeheartedly agreed about Apple's addition of automatic app updates. "Many 1-star app ratings and customer confusion [are] caused by using outdated apps that no longer work," he said. "This will hopefully reduce that problem. Secondly, this will allow developers to iterate much faster and push bug fixes to their users easily."

Auto-updates were only the beginning. Kyle Baxter, iOS developer behind Basil, took a liking to AirDrop coming to iOS: "Being able to share things directly to another person from any application is going to be incredibly convenient."

Two Tap Labs partner Shawn Wall had hoped to see more about iOS integration in the auto industry but felt optimistic about what he saw on stage. "In my opinion the most intriguing and inventive plan today was taking iOS to the auto industry. Details weren't exactly provided, but this could be the first integration point of several in the future and also hints at a much wider relative design pattern (super-autolayout, à la Android) that could be utilized by developers," Wall said. "In addition, what other types of hardware could we developers also possibly be developing for in the future?"

Float Mobile Learning's Dan Pfeiffer added that the ability to better multitask in the background on iOS would help out his enterprise users. "The new multitasking abilities are especially exciting because it means our apps are able to provide our users with the data they need when they want it," Pfeiffer told Ars. "For our enterprise clients, the new per-app VPN capabilities are great because they will allow [the clients] to secure enterprise apps with an infrastructure they may already have in place."

Face-off over UI

While there was plenty to like about iOS 7's new feature set, the operating system's new look ended up being a controversial one among the developer crowd.

Of course, there were some who welcomed something new, no matter how extreme. Buster developer Chris Cieslak claimed he "loved pretty much everything" he saw presented about iOS 7. "Some people will probably complain that parts of 7, especially notifications and the Control Center, are playing catch-up to Android, but so what?" Cieslak said. "If I had to pick one, I love the fact that almost everything changed visually, as iOS was getting a little stale."

Kyle Baxter also weighed in on the new look, but declined to decide just yet whether it was good or bad for developers. "I'm still wrapping my mind around the new interface so I don't have much to say there yet about whether that's a negative (obviously it's going to be a lot of work), but man—what a radical change," Baxter said.

Indeed, iOS 7's "gratuitous use of white space" (as described by Dillon) and lack of borders around many of its buttons was seen as both visually pleasing but difficult for outsiders to work with. "I can see where this could cause problems with less design-oriented developers. It was worth the risk, though. Fair play to Apple for raising the bar for us developers and designers," Zak Dillon said.

But a number of those we spoke to disagreed that simply "raising the bar" for designers was a good direction to go. "Being a huge proponent of flat design, so far I'm disappointed by what I've seen in iOS7. The icons are simply poor and amateur, as their interior contents are much too large for their containers, and the new font feels very forced in certain scenarios throughout the Apple provided applications," Shawn Wall told Ars.

"With no edge definition and no contrast, users may not realize that something is clickable," Darshan Shankar added.

Justin Williams, developer and founder of SecondGear, was among the most vocal about iOS 7's UI. "I do not like the new user interface. I think they swung too far in the opposite direction just to prove that they could do something different. Look at those buttons—what is even going on there?" Williams told Ars. He did, however, remain optimistic about Apple eventually finding a balance. "I think in another year, they'll swing back a bit and end up somewhere in the middle."

You've been Sherlocked. (The support group meets at the bar.)

It's not a WWDC if someone's software isn't "Sherlocked"—a phenomenon that involves Apple integrating (or sometimes flat-out copying) features from popular third-party software into its own, leaving those developers to figure out how to move forward without losing business.

Last year, it was Marco Arment's Instapaper (now owned by Betaworks) being copied as Apple's "Reading List" in Safari, and OmniGroup's task management app OmniFocus getting presented as Apple's then-new app, Reminders. At the time, both OmniGroup CEO Ken Case and Arment remained optimistic that their apps would continue to serve their users well despite Apple's "flattery."

This year, at least two companies saw some of their most prominent features make an appearance in iOS 7, though their reactions to the announcements were mixed.

Third-party mail app Mailbox, whose users had to go through a weeks-long wait to begin using it upon launch earlier this year, saw its popular swipe gestures mirrored in Apple's own Mail app for iOS 7. Mailbox likes to treat the inbox like a to-do list or task bucket, allowing users to swipe left or right in order to prioritize, delete, or mark messages for review when they're cleaning out their e-mail. Apple briefly demoed functionality in Mail that practically mirrored Mailbox's features, but when asked, Mailbox declined to comment.

Another major feature introduced to Safari on both iOS and OS X was iCloud Keychain: essentially a password manager that's integrated into the browser and syncs passwords across devices using iCloud. Think it sounds a lot like 1Password from Agilebits? So did I. 1Password had become popular on the Mac and, in recent years, expanded its service to the iOS realm. But with Apple offering a strikingly similar feature set for iCloud Keychain to its entire Mac and iOS user base—and for free, at that—I couldn't help but wonder what Agilebits thought.

Agilebits "Herald" (and former Ars contributor) David Chartier maintained an air of enthusiasm about Apple's announcement. "Better security is a win for everyone, and this is a validation of our message and what we've been building with 1Password for over half a decade. Now, If people are worried about [what] Apple's announcements mean for 1Password, ask Pocket and Dropbox how they’re doing after Reading List and iCloud," Chartier told Ars.

Chartier went on to argue that 1Password "isn't just a password manager for one browser" like iCloud Keychain will be (Keychain is only functional in Safari). "1Password supports multiple browsers and platforms, multiple accounts at each site, and it secures so much more than passwords and even credit cards," he said. "Perhaps more importantly, 1Password puts you in control of your data and where it goes. Out of the box, your data stays local on your machine until you choose to enable a cloud service like Dropbox or iCloud (on iOS now, Mac soon). We also have a USB sync solution for users who don't want their data in the cloud, but we're free to add more cloud sync services down the road."

Agilebits' reaction largely mirrors that of Case and Arment from 2012, and it's likely that most of the company's user base will continue to use the software despite iCloud Keychain. Still, Sherlocked companies must be concerned on some level about what Apple's future plans might be; the pressure's now on to stay a few steps ahead of Apple at all times.

Jacqui Cheng
Jacqui is an Editor at Large at Ars Technica, where she has spent the last eight years writing about Apple culture, gadgets, social networking, privacy, and more. Emailjacqui@arstechnica.com//Twitter@eJacqui